Balázs Eszter: Art in action. Lajos Kassák's Avant-Garde Journals from A Tett to Dokumentum, 1915-1927 - The avant-garde and its journals 3. (Budapest, 2017)

Gábor Dobó: Generation Change, Synthesis and a Programme for a New Society - Dokumentum in Budapest (1926-1927)

avant-garde, A Láthatár [Horizon] (1927); the periodical that Lajos Nagy set up to counter “bourgeois literature",10 11 Együtt [Together] (1927-1928); and the poet Lőrinc Szabó’s PandoraJ Critics of the time unanimouslyjudged these organs to be “generational” forums, all aimed at attacking the hegemony of Nyugat in the autonomous position in the literary field.12 13 [Figs. 7-8]

Dokumentum also set out to be a trend-dictating journal and a unique feature of the Hungarian cultural press market. Its opening article bore the heading, A Nyugat húsz éves [Nyugat is twenty years old], the editors1- set the honoured but, in their view, outdated Nyugat against the new representative of “vigorous youth” - Dokumentum. The most prestigious journal was now “fruitlessly vegetating", and the article implied that the generation represented by Dokumentum should displace it, and the generation it embodied. In Kassák’s usage, the “young ones” was a reference to “societal age”. They were new figures in literary life, young writers and those, like Kassák himself, who came from outside the institutional system. Kassák's biological age put him in the same category as the first generation of Nyugat (he was forty when Dokumentum was launched), and he associated “youth” with the new or avant-garde conception of art. The Dokumentum editorial was effectively an avant-garde manifesto; instead of giving an analytical account of Hungarian affairs of the time, it rhetorically set the avant-garde (associated with notions of novelty and youth) against the integrative, tradition-preserving modernity represented by Nyugat (associated with the past, and an ageing generation).

In reality, Kassák and his avant-garde associates had somewhat more complex relations with Nyugat than their Dokumentum programme implied. Kassák positioned himself and his journal in opposition to Nyugat, but still regarded it as the best literary journal in Hungary and a worthy competitor. In its consolidated position, run by experienced editors with reputations of their own, working with major authors, and with a solid financial foundation,

10 N.n. [Lajos Nagy], Az Együtt útja [The path of Együtt], Együtt, 1/1., 1927,1-2.

11 Lőrinc Szabó, Karinthy, a kritika és az alapszabályszerű modernség [Karinthy, criticism and constitutional modernity], Pandora, 1/3., 1927,180-182.

12 See, e.g., Sándor Jakobovits, “Pandora”, az ifjú írói generáció mentsvára Budapesten [Pandora, the refuge of the young writers generation], Reggel, 16 January 1927,11. Tivadar Raith, Új lapok köszöntése [Welcome to new journals], Magyar írás, 7/3., 1927,17-19. László Rubin, Új folyóiratok, régi hangok [New journals, old voices], A Láthatár, 1/2., 1927,1-2. N.n., A legprogresszívebb irodalmi irányok új magyar folyóiratai [New Hungarian journals of the most progressive literary schools], Literatura, 2/1., 1927,90-91. See also, György Tverdota, A Nyugat és az avantgarde között [Between Nyugat and the avant-garde], Literatura, 4/3-4., 1977, 76-94.

13 Lajos Kassák-Tibor Déry-Gyula lllyés-úózsef Nádass-Andor Németh, A Nyugat húsz éves [Nyugat is twenty years old], Dokumentum, 1/1., 1926, 2-3.

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